Eric Secrist > Eric's Quotes

“[A] man who has risked his life knows that careers are worthless, and a man who will not risk his career has a worthless life.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known”
― Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

“Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What is now lacking?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“But the secrets of such a book are not perpetual. Once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all the secrets of the universe. Eventually the seeker of a recondite knowledge may conclude—either through insight or sheer exhaustion—that this ruthless process is never-ending, that the mortification of one mystery after another has no terminus beyond that of the seeker's own extinction. And how many still remain susceptible to the search? How many pursue it to the end of their days with undying hope of some ultimate revelation? Better not to think in precise terms just how few the faithful are.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.”
― Orson Scott Card

“Inside us there is a place that is our true self.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“When you don't understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them?" ...

"You don't take the blame," he answered. "But you still take responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“A pure soul must never grow attached to any one thing. A pure soul must expose himself to new things every day.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man. Qing-jao”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“No one likes to find out that the story he always believed about his own identity is false.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“It's intelligence that makes you unhappy.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Only there were plenty of parents who didn’t do that. Plenty of parents who tried to keep their children down, to control them, to make slaves of them. Where she had grown up, Wang-mu had seen plenty of that. So what Wiggin was describing wasn’t parents, really. He was describing good parents. He wasn’t telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“You will soon learn that there ARE no strange stars, no alien skies"
- No?
"Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavour, and all flavours good"
- Now YOU think like a tree. Flavours! Of skies!
"I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“came because I commanded.” “You commanded. I came. If you want to think you caused my coming, so be it. But God’s commands are the only ones I obey willingly.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“All the way up to the surface, Valentine struggled to make sense of what had happened. She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there’d be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn’t understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“You can deny any sacrifice by claiming that it made the sufferer feel so good to do it that it really wasn’t a sacrifice at all, but just another selfish act.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“it’s often the ideas that sound most absurd and counterintuitive at first that later cause fundamental shifts in the way we see the world.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Today, one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing?
You answered...
I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.
You who speak languages, you are such liars.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we 'understand.' Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word every now and then.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide